PLAYBOY INTERVIEW:JIM GARRISONa candid conversation with the embattled district attorney
of new orleans

On February 17, 1967, the New
Orleans States-Item broke a story that would electrify the
world -- and hurl district attorney Jim Garrison into a bitter
fight for his political life. An enterprising reporter, checking
vouchers filed with the city by the district attorney's office,
discovered that Garrison had spent over $8000 investigating the
assassination of President Kennedy. "Has the district attorney
discovered valuable additional evidence," the States-Item
asked editorially, "or is he merely saving some interesting
new information that will gain for him exposure in a national
magazine?" Stung, Garrison counter-attacked, confirming
that an inquiry into Kennedy's assassination was under way and
charging that the States-Item's "irresponsible"
revelation "has now created a problem for us in finding
witnesses and getting cooperation from other witnesses and in
at least one case has endangered the life of a witness."
On February 18, newsmen from all over
the world converged on New Orleans to hear Garrison announce
at a press conference: "We have been investigating the role
of the city of New Orleans in the assassination of President
Kennedy, and we have made some Progress -- I think substantial
progress.... What's more, there will be arrests." As reporters
flashed news of Garrison's statement across the world, a 49-year-old
New Orleans pilot, David Ferrie, told newsmen that the district
attorney had him "pegged as the getaway pilot in an elaborate
plot to kill Kennedy." Ferrie, a bizarre figure who wore
a flaming-red wig, false eyebrows and make-up to conceal burns
he had suffered years before, denied any involvement in a conspiracy
to kill the President. Garrison, he said, was out to frame him.
Four days later, Ferrie was found dead in his shabby three-room
apartment in New Orleans, ostensibly of natural causes -- though
he left behind two suicide notes.
The press had greeted Garrison's initial
claims about a conspiracy with a measure of skepticism, but Ferrie's
death was front-page news around the world. Garrison broke his
self-imposed silence to charge that Ferrie was "a man who,
in my judgment, was one of history's most important individuals."
According to Garrison, "Mr. Ferrie was one of those individuals
I had in mind when I said there would be arrests shortly. We
had reached a decision to arrest him early next week. Apparently
we waited too long." But Garrison vowed that Ferrie's death
would not halt his investigation, and added, "My staff and
I solved the assassination weeks ago. I wouldn't say this if
we didn't have the evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt. We know
the key individuals, the cities involved and how it was done."On March 1, Garrison eclipsed
even the headlines from his previous press conference by announcing
the arrest of Clay Shaw, a wealthy New Orleans businessman and
real-estate developer, on charges of conspiring to assassinate
John F. Kennedy. One of New Orleans' most prominent citizens,
Shaw was a founder and director of the city's prestigious International
Trade Mart from 1947 to 1962, when he retired to devote his time
to playwriting and restoring historic homes in the old French
Quarter. The day after Shaw's arrest, Garrison declared that
"Shaw was none other than Clay Bertrand," the shadowy
queen bee of the New Orleans homosexual underworld, who, according
to attorney Dean Andrews' testimony before the Warren Commission,
called him the day after the assassination and asked him to rush
to Dallas to defend Oswald. Shaw heatedly denied his guilt: "I
never heard of any plot and I never used any alias in my life."
But New Orleans society, which had long counted Shaw one of its
own, was stunned.
On March 14, a panel of three judges
heard Garrison's case in a preliminary hearing to determine if
there was enough evidence against Shaw to bring him to trial.
Perry Raymond Russo, a 25-year-old life-insurance salesman from
Baton Rouge who had once been Ferrie's "roommate,"
testified that in mid-September of 1963, he had attended a meeting
at Ferrie's apartment where Shaw, Lee Harvey Oswald and Ferrie
discussed means of assassinating the President in a "triangulation
of cross fire." Garrison's second witness, Vernon Bundy,
a 29-year-old former narcotics addict, testified that in the
summer of 1963, he saw Shaw pass a sum of money to Lee Harvey
Oswald on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. On March 17, after
a four-day hearing, Judges Malcolm V. O'Hara, Bernard J. Bagert
and Matthew S. Braniff ruled there was sufficient evidence to
hold Clay Shaw for trial. Garrison's hand was further strengthened
on March 22, when a 12-member grand jury of prominent New Orleans
citizens, empaneled to hear Garrison's case, also ruled there
were sufficient grounds to bring Shaw to court. Pending trial
-- which is scheduled to begin sometime this month -- Shaw was
allowed to go free on $10,000 bail.
The American press remained dubious about
Garrison's ability to prove his charges in court, and domestic
coverage of and commentary on the district attorney's case thereafter
was, at best, low-key -- at worst, contemptuous. But as Newsweek
reported on March 20, "In Europe, where thousands still
cling to the conspiracy theory in spite of the Warren Commission's
conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone Garrison and his
investigation have been the stuff of page-one headlines."
"I'm encouraged by the support Europe is bringing me,"
he told a Paris-Match reporter. "Every day, I receive
letters and telegrams from all the capitals. I've even had six
telephone calls from Moscow." One was from Literaturnaya
Gazeta, a Prestigious Moscow literary magazine, which ran
an interview with Garrison concluding that there was a conspiracy
to kill Kennedy but that Oswald "definitely wasn't the key
figure in it."
Garrison also had his supporters in the
U. S. Boston's Richard Cardinal Cushing, father-confessor to
the Kennedy family, said of the New Orleans probe on March 16:
"I think they should follow it through. I never believed
that the assassination was the work of one man." And Representative
Roman Pucinski, an Illinois Democrat, said: "I'm surprised
more attention hasn't been paid to the ruling that Clay Shaw
go on trial for participating in a plot to assassinate President
Kennedy. These aren't nuts but three judges talking. It's a new
ball game." Senator Russell Long of Louisiana also backed
up Garrison -- an old political ally -- contending that he was
only doing "what a district attorney should do." And
perennial Warren Report critic Mark Lane (himself aPLAYBOYinterviewee last February),
whose best-selling "Rush to Judgment" helped persuade
Garrison to launch his investigation, said after a conference
with Garrison in New Orleans that the D.A.'s probe would "break
the entire case wide open."
If nothing else, Garrison was certainly
affecting public opinion. A Louis Harris poll of May 29 revealed
that 66 percent of the American public now believes there was
a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, and "a major contributor
to this swelling doubt is the investigation into the assassination
by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison." Even with
public opinion on his side, Garrison was running into difficulties
on several fronts by early summer. Three witnesses he wished
to question about their complicity in the assassination had fled
Louisiana, and he was unable to obtain their extradition to New
Orleans -- a seldom-encountered roadblock he credits to the CIA,
"which knows that some of its former employees were involved
in the Kennedy assassination and is doing everything possible
to frustrate my investigation in order to preserve the Agency's
good name." The CIA refuses to comment on Garrison's charges.
Garrison was also under heavy fire over
the improper methods allegedly employed by his staff. The most
blistering indictment of his probe was an NBC television special
on June 19, charging that Garrison's investigators had tried
to bribe three potential witnesses -- Alvin Beauboeuf, Miguel
Torres and Fred Leemans -- to testify against Shaw; that Garrison's
staff had attempted to induce a burglar, John Cancler, to plant
false evidence in Clay Shaw's home; and that Garrison had allowed
Perry Russo and Vernon Bundy to testify against Shaw even though
they had previously failed lie-detector tests. NBC added that
its investigators had also unearthed the real "Clay Bertrand";
and though NBC didn't name him, it said that he was not
Clay Shaw. Subsequently, NBC might have had second thoughts about
its expose, for the network granted Garrison an unprecedented
30 minutes of prime Saturday-evening time to rebut its own findings.
Garrison charged that the three witnesses who claimed his aids
had tried to bribe them were perjurers. He also denied that his
office had approached John Cancler to burglarize Shaw's home,
and stated flatly that both Russo and Bundy had passed their
polygraph tests. On the key point of the "real" Clay
Bertrand, Garrison said that he knew the identity of the individual
NBC was talking about and that he was definitely not the man
who called attorney Dean Andrews to gain legal aid for Lee Harvey
Oswald.
Undismayed -- and undeterred -- by all
the charges and countercharges, Garrison still says, "We
are going to win this case, and anyone who bets against us is
going to lose his money." The embattled district attorney
may be overconfident, but he has a history of winning every fight
he starts. Born in Dennison, Iowa, on November 20, 1921, Garrison
flew an unarmored spotter plane for the artillery in France and
Germany during World War Two and then attended Tulane University
Law School. He then went to New Orleans to work as an assistant
district attorney until 1961, when he resigned with a scorching
attack on Mayor Victor H. Schiro, whom he charged with corruption
and failure to rigorously enforce the law.
Garrison entered the race for district
attorney as a fiercely uncompromising reform candidate, lambasting
the "political machine" of Mayor Schiro and characterizing
the incumbent district attorney, Richard Dowling, as "the
great emancipator -- he let everybody go free." Garrison,
six feet, six, and 240 pounds, was quickly dubbed the "Jolly
Green Giant." He had no political organization and not much
money, but his personal magnetism and refusal to compromise appealed
to the New Orleans electorate. He defeated Dowling handily and
promptly began convicting men on charges his predecessor had
dropped.
Garrison's five years as district attorney
have been stormy. He outraged many of his former supporters in
the business community by launching a campaign against vice on
Bourbon Street, charging that B-girls were mercilessly fleecing
naive tourists. Garrison cleaned up Bourbon Street himself, personally
padlocking many honky-tonks and striptease clubs. But his toughest
fight -- until the current one -- came in 1962, when he announced
that the refusal of the city's eight criminal-court judges to
approve funds for his investigations of organized crime "raised
interesting questions about racketeer influences." The judges
promptly charged Garrison with defamation of character and criminal
libel -- and a state court fined him $1000. Garrison appealed
the case all the way to the Supreme Court, and on November 23,
1964, in a landmark decision on the right to criticize public
officials, the nation's highest tribunal reversed his conviction,
contending that "speech concerning public affairs is more
than self-expression; it is the essence of self-government."
Never one to turn the other cheek, Garrison subsequently employed
his political influence to unseat a number of the judges when
they came up for re-election.
The district attorney's independence
has at times nettled both left and right in New Orleans. When
the police department tried to prosecute a bookdealer for selling
James Baldwin's "Another Country," Garrison stepped
in with a broadside against censorship and won the man's release
-- promptly bringing down on his head the wrath of the local
White Citizens Council. At the other end of the political spectrum,
he has been criticized by the liberal American Civil Liberties
Union, which once accused him of trying an alleged rapist "in
the press rather than in the courtroom." But Negro leaders
in the city say Garrison has been a fair and impartial district
attorney; in his last bid for re-election, he polled as well
in the Negro precincts as he did in the white.
The years 1965 and 1966 were -- by Garrison's
standards -- relatively quiet. His only major public controversy
during this period fared up when he interceded with Louisiana
Governor John McKeithen to win a pardon for a local stripper
named Linda Birgette, who had been convicted on a charge of lewd
dancing. Garrison claimed it was impossible to define obscenity
in literature or the arts and argued that jailing Miss Birgette
would be a "gross miscarriage of justice." McKeithen
acceded to his pleas and, despite cries of protest from local
bluenoses, the incident served to increase Garrison's popularity.The same could hardly be said of his
current probe, which has made him both a target for abuse --
justified or otherwise -- that has tended to obscure rather than
clarify the issues involved in the investigation, and a victim
of often one-sided press coverage that NBC's half hour of equal
time has done little to rectify. In PLAYBOY's
opinion, Garrison has not yet had the chance to present his side
of the case -- in court or out -- without expurgation or editorializing.
We feel he ought to have that chance. Toward this end, in mid-July,
we approached the embattled district attorney with our offer
of an impartial, open-ended interview. The 12-hour cross-examination
that followed -- in the midst of Garrison's round-the-clock investigation
-- was conducted in the living room of the two-story home he
shares with his blonde wife and three young children in a tree-lined
residential neighborhood of New Orleans. As the dog-tired district
attorney stretched his long legs across a couch, battered briar
pipe (a political trademark) in one hand, a vodka martini (his
favorite drink) in the other, PLAYBOYinterviewer Eric Norden began by asking him to
answer the most damaging charges of his critics.

"To read the press accounts
of my investigation, I'm a cross between Al Capone and Attila
the Hun--bribing, threatening innocent men. Anybody who employs
those methods should be disbarred."

"A number of the men who
killed the President were former employees of the CIA involved
in its anti-Castro underground activities in the New Orleans
area. The CIA knows their identity. So do I."

"President Kennedy was killed
for one reason: because he was working for a reconciliation with
the U.S.S.R. and Castro's Cuba. His assassins were a group of
fanatic anti-Communists and Cuban exiles."

PLAYBOY: You have been accused
-- by the National Broadcasting Company, Newsweek, the
New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission and your own former
investigative aide William Gurvich -- of attempts to intimidate
witnesses, of engaging in criminal conspiracy and of inciting
to such felonies as perjury, criminal defamation and public bribery.
How do you respond to these charges?

GARRISON: I've stopped beating
my wife. All the charges you enumerate have been made with one
purpose in mind -- to place our office on the defensive and make
us waste valuable time answering allegations that have no basis
in fact. Also involved is a psychological by-product valuable
to those who don't want the truth about Kennedy's assassination
to become known: The very repetition of a charge lends it a certain
credibility, since people have a tendency to believe that where
there's smoke, there's fire -- although I find it difficult to
believe that the public will put much credence in most of the
dastardly deeds I've been accused of in the past few months.
Just recently, for example, the rumor went around that my staff
was peddling marijuana to high school students and that one of
our major witnesses had just confessed that his testimony was
based on a dream induced by an overdose of LSD. We've also been
accused of planning an attack on the local FBI office with guns
loaded with red pepper, having stolen money from our own investigative
files and having threatened to shoot one witness in the derriere
with an exotic gun propelling truth-serum darts. I just hope
they never find out about my involvement in the Boston Brinks
robbery. I must admit, however, that I'm beginning to worry about
the cumulative effect of this propaganda blitzkrieg on potential
jurors for the trial of Clay Shaw. I don't know how long they
can withstand the drumbeat obbligato of charges exonerating the
defendant and convicting the prosecutor. For months now, the
establishment's artillery units have been pounding away at the
two themes NBC focused on -- that my office uses "improper
methods" with regard to witnesses and that we don't really
have a case against Mr. Shaw and he should never be brought to
trial. I hope you'll give me the chance to answer each of these
charges in detail; but first, let me elaborate a bit on the methods
we employ in this or any other investigation. My office has been
one of the most scrupulous in the country with regard to the
protection of individual rights. I've been on record for years
in law journals and books as championing the rights of the individual
against the oppressive power of the state. My office moved in
and prevented police seizure from bookstores of books arbitrarily
labeled "obscene." I intervened and managed to persuade
the Louisiana legislature to remove a provision from its new
code of criminal procedure that would allow judges to reach out
from the bench and cite newsmen for contempt if they penned anything
embarrassing to the judges. My office has investigated cases
where we had already obtained convictions; and on discovering
new evidence indicating that the defendant was not guilty, we've
obtained a reversal of the verdict. In over five years of office,
I have never had a single case reversed because of the use of
improper methods -- a record I'll match with any other D. A.
in the country. In this particular case, I've taken unusual steps
to protect the rights of the defendant and assure him a fair
trial. Before we introduced the testimony of our witnesses, we
made them undergo independent verifying tests, including polygraph
examination, truth serum and hypnosis. We thought this would
be hailed as an unprecedented step in jurisprudence; instead,
the press turned around and hinted that we had drugged our witnesses
or given them posthypnotic suggestions to testify falsely. After
arresting Mr. Shaw, we filed a motion for a preliminary hearing
-- a proceeding that essentially operates in the defendant's
favor. Such a hearing is generally requested by the defense,
and it was virtually unheard of that the motion be filed by the
state, which under the law has the right to charge a defendant
outright, without any evaluation by a judge of the pending charges.
But I felt that because of the enormity of this accusation, we
should lean over backward and give the defendant every chance.
A three-judge panel heard our evidence against Mr. Shaw and his
attorneys' rebuttals and ordered him indicted for conspiracy
to assassinate the President. And I might add here that it's
a matter of record that my relationship with the judiciary of
our fair city is not a Damon-Pythias camaraderie. Once the judges
had handed down their decision, we could have immediately filed
a charge against the defendant just by signing it and depositing
it with the city clerk -- the customary method of charging a
defendant. Nevertheless, out of concern for Mr. Shaw's rights,
we voluntarily presented the case to a blue-ribbon grand jury.
If this grand jury had failed to indict Mr. Shaw, our case would
have been dead as a doornail. But the grand jury, composed of
12 eminent New Orleans citizens, heard our evidence and indicted
the defendant for participation in a conspiracy to assassinate
John Kennedy. In a further effort to protect the rights of the
defendant, and in the face of the endlessly reiterated accusation
that we have no case against him -- despite the unanimous verdict
of the grand jury and the judges at the preliminary hearing --
I have studiously refrained from making any public statement
critical of the defendant or prejudging his guilt. Of course,
this puts me at a considerable disadvantage when the press claims
I have no case against him, because the only way I could convince
them of the strength of my case is to throw open our files and
let them examine the testimony of all our witnesses. Apart from
the injustice such an act would do Mr. Shaw, it could get our
whole case thrown out of court on the grounds that we had prejudiced
the defendant's rights by pretrial publicity. So I won't fall
into that particular trap, whatever the provocation. I only wish
the press would allow our case to stand or fall on its merits
in court. It appears that certain elements of the mass media
have an active interest in preventing this case from ever coming
to trial at all and find it necessary to employ against me every
smear device in the book. To read the press accounts of my investigation
-- my "circus," I should say -- I'm a cross between
Al Capone and Attila the Hun, ruthlessly hounding innocent men,
trampling their legal rights, bribing and threatening witnesses
and in general violating every canon of legal ethics. My God,
anybody who employs the kind of methods that elements of the
news media attribute to me should not only not be a district
attorney, he should be disbarred. This case has taught me the
difference between image and reality, and the power of the mythmakers.
But I know I've done everything possible to conduct this investigation
with honesty and integrity and with full respect for the civil
rights of the defendant. But a blanket denial of charges against
me isn't going to convince anyone, so why don't we consider them
one by one?

PLAYBOY: All right. The May
15th issue of Newsweek charged that two of your investigators
offered David Ferrie's former roommate, Alvin Beauboeuf, $3000
and an airline job if he would help substantiate your charges
against Clay Shaw. How do you answer this accusation?

GARRISON: Mr. Beauboeuf was
one of the two men who accompanied David Ferrie on a mysterious
trip from New Orleans to Texas on the day of the assassination,
so naturally we were interested in him from the very start of
our investigation. At first he showed every willingness to cooperate
with our office; but after Ferrie's death, somebody gave him
a free trip to Washington. From that moment on, a change came
over Beauboeuf; he refused to cooperate with us any further and
he made the charges against my investigators to which you refer.
Fortunately, Beauboeuf had signed an affidavit on April 12th
-- well after the alleged bribe offer was supposed to have been
made -- affirming that "no representative of the New Orleans
Parish district attorney's office has ever asked me to do anything
but to tell the truth. Any inference or statement by anyone to
the contrary has no basis in fact." As soon as his attorney
began broadcasting his charges, we asked the New Orleans police
department to thoroughly investigate the matter. And on June
12th, the police department -- which is not, believe me, in the
pocket of the district attorney's office -- released a report
concluding that exhaustive investigation by the police intelligence
branch had cleared my staff of any attempt to bribe or threaten
Beauboeuf into giving untrue testimony. There was no mention
of this report, predictably enough, in Newsweek. Let me
make one thing clear, though: Like every police department and
district attorney's office across the country, we have sums set
aside to pay informers for valuable information -- but we would
never suborn perjury. This isn't because we're saints -- short
cuts like that could be awfully tempting in a frustrating case
-- but because we're realistic enough to know that any witness
who can be bought by us can also be bought by the other side.
So it's rather naive, apart from being ethically objectionable,
to assume that our investigators travel around the country with
bags of money trying to bribe witnesses to lie on the witness
stand. We just don't operate that way.

PLAYBOY: On an NBC television
special, "The J.F.K. Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison,"
a former Turkish-bathhouse operator in New Orleans, Fred Leemans,
claimed that one of your aides offered him money to testify that
Clay Shaw had frequented his establishment with Lee Harvey Oswald.
Do you also deny this charge?

GARRISON: Yes; and it's a perfect
illustration of the point I was just making about how easy it
is for the other side to buy witnesses and then charge us with
its own misconduct. Mr. Leemans came to us in early May, volunteering
testimony to the effect that he had often seen a man named Clay
Bertrand in his bathhouse, sometimes accompanied by men he described
as "Latins." In a sworn affidavit, Leemans said he
had also seen a young man called Lee with Bertrand on four or
five occasions -- a man who fits the description of Lee Harvey
Oswald. Leemans also identified the Clay Bertrand who had frequented
his establishment as Clay Shaw. Now, this was important testimony,
and initially we were favorably impressed with Mr. Leemans. But
then we started receiving calls from him demanding money. Well,
I've told you our policy on this, and the answer was a flat no.
He was quiet for a while and then he called and asked if we would
approve if he sold his story to a magazine, since he badly needed
money. We refused to give him such approval. Apparently, the
National Broadcasting Company was able to establish a warmer
relationship with Mr. Leemans. In any case, he now says that
he didn't really lie to us; he just "told us what he thought
we wanted to hear." I'm sure he was equally cooperative
with NBC -- although he's beginning to spread his favors around.
When a reporter asked him for more information after the broadcast,
Leemans refused, explaining that he was saving himself for the
Associated Press, "since I want to make something out of
this." I would like to make one personal remark about Mr.
Leemans. I don't know if he was lying to us initially or not
-- though I suspect from other evidence in my possession that
his statement as he first gave it was accurate -- but anybody,
no matter what his financial straits, who tries to make a fast
buck off the assassination of John Kennedy is several rungs below
the anthropoid ape on the evolutionary scale.

PLAYBOY: On this same NBC show,
newsman Frank McGee claimed that NBC investigators had discovered
that your two key witnesses against Clay Shaw -- Perry Russo
and Vernon Bundy -- both failed polygraph tests prior to their
testimony before the grand jury. In the case of Russo, who claimed
to have attended a meeting at David Ferrie's apartment where
Shaw, Oswald and Ferrie plotted the assassination, NBC said that
"Russo's answers to a series of questions indicate, in the
language of the polygraph operator, 'deception criteria.' He
was asked if he knew Clay Shaw. He was asked if he knew Lee Harvey
Oswald. His 'yes' answer to both of these questions indicated
'deception criteria.'" Did Bundy and Russo fail their lie-detector
tests?

GARRISON: No, and NBC's allegations
in this area are about as credible as its other charges. The
men who administered both polygraph tests flatly deny that Russo
and Bundy failed the test. I'll offer right now to make Russo's
and Bundy's polygraph tests accessible to any reputable investigator
or reporter the day Clay Shaw's trial begins; I can't do it before
that, because I'm restrained from releasing material pertaining
to Shaw's guilt or innocence. Just for your information, though,
the veracity of Bundy and Russo has been affirmed not only through
polygraph tests but through hypnosis and the administration of
sodium amytal -- truth serum. I want to make a proposition to
the president of NBC: If this charge is true, then I will resign
as district attorney of New Orleans. If it's untrue, however,
then the president of NBC should resign. Just in case he thinks
I'm kidding, I'm ready to meet with him at any time to select
a mutually acceptable committee to determine once and for all
the truth or falsehood of this charge. In all fairness, however,
I must add that the fact Bundy and Russo passed their polygraph
tests is not, in and of itself, irrefutable proof that they were
telling the truth; that's why we administered the other tests.
The lie detector isn't a foolproof technique. A man well rehearsed
and in complete control of himself can master those reactions
that would register on the polygraph as deception criteria and
get away with blatant lies, while someone who is extremely nervous
and anxiety-ridden could tell the truth and have it register
as a lie. Much also depends on who administers the test, since
it can easily be rigged. For example, Jack Ruby took a lie-detector
test for the Warren Commission and told lie after outright lie
-- even little lies that could be easily checked -- and yet the
Warren Commission concluded that he passed the test. So the polygraph
is only one weapon in the arsenal we use to verify a witness'
testimony, and we have never considered it conclusive; we have
abundant documentation to corroborate their stories.

PLAYBOY: Two convicts, Miguel
Torres and John Cancler, told NBC that Vernon Bundy admitted
having lied in his testimony linking Clay Shaw to Lee Oswald.
Do you dismiss this as just another NBC fabrication?

GARRISON: Messrs. Cancler and
Torres were both convicted by my office, as were almost half
the men in the state penitentiary, and I'm sure the great majority
of them have little love for the man who sent them up. I don't
know if they fabricated their stories in collusion with NBC or
on their own for motives of revenge, but I'm convinced from what
I know of Vernon Bundy that his testimony was truthful. NBC manipulated
the statements of Cancler and Torres to give the impression to
the viewer that he was watching a trial on television -- my trial
-- and that these "objective" witnesses were saying
exactly what they would say in a court of law. Actually -- and
NBC scrupulously avoided revealing this to its audience -- their
"testimony" was not under oath, there was no opportunity
for cross-examination or the presentation of rebuttal witnesses,
and the statements of Cancler, Torres and all the rest of NBC's
road company were edited so that the public would hear only those
elements of their story that would damage our case. The rules
of evidence and adversary procedure, I might add, have been developed
over many years precisely to prevent this kind of phony side
show. Of course, these two convicts have been used against my
office in variety of respects. Miguel Torres also claims I offered
him a full pardon, a vacation in Florida and an ounce of heroin
if he would testify that Clay Shaw had made homosexual overtures
to him on the street. What on earth that would have established
relevant to this case I still don't know, but that's his story.
I think it was actually rather cheap of me to offer Torres only
an ounce of heroin; that wouldn't have lasted out his vacation.
A kilo would be more like it. After all, I'm not stingy. Torres'
friend John Cancler, a burglar, has also charged that one of
my investigators tried to induce him to burglarize Clay Shaw's
house and plant false evidence there, but he refused because
he would not have such a heinous sin on his conscience. I suppose
that's why Cancler's prison nickname is "John the Baptist."
I can assure you, if we ever wanted to burglarize Shaw's home
-- which we never did -- John the Baptist would be the last man
on earth we'd pick for the job. By the way, Mr. Cancler was called
before the grand jury and asked if he had told the truth to NBC.
He replied; "I refuse to answer on the grounds that my answer
might incriminate me" -- and was promptly sentenced to six
months in prison and a $500 fine for contempt of court.

PLAYBOY: The NBC special also
claimed to have discovered that "Clay, or Clem, Bertrand
does exist. Clem Bertrand is not his real name. It is a pseudonym
used by a homosexual in New Orleans. For his protection, we will
not disclose the real name of the man known as Clem Bertrand.
His real name has been given to the Department of Justice. He
is not Clay Shaw." Doesn't this undermine your entire case
against Shaw?

GARRISON: Your faith in NBC's
veracity is touching and indicates that the Age of Innocence
is not yet over. NBC does not have the real Clay Bertrand; the
man whose name NBC so melodramatically turned over to the Justice
Department is that of Eugene Davis, a New Orleans bar owner,
who has firmly denied under oath that he has ever used the name
Clay, or Clem, Bertrand. We know from incontrovertible evidence
in our possession who the real Clay Bertrand is -- and we will
prove it in court. But to make this whole thing a little clearer,
let me tell you the genesis of the whole "Clay Bertrand"
story. A New Orleans lawyer, Dean Andrews, told the Warren Commission
that a few months before the assassination of President Kennedy,
Lee Harvey Oswald and a group of "gay Mexicanos" came
to his office and requested Andrews' aid in having Oswald's Marine
Corps undesirable discharge changed to an honorable discharge;
Oswald subsequently returned alone with other legal problems.
Andrews further testified that the day after President Kennedy
was assassinated, he received a call from Clay Bertrand, who
asked him to rush to Dallas to represent Oswald. Andrews claims
he subsequently saw Bertrand in a New Orleans bar, but Bertrand
fled when Andrews approached him. This was intriguing testimony,
although the Warren Commission dismissed it out of hand; and
in 1964, Mark Lane traveled to New Orleans to speak to Andrews.
He found him visibly frightened. "I'll take you to dinner,"
Andrews told Lane, "but I can't talk about the case. I called
Washington and they told me that if I said anything, I might
get a bullet in the head." For the same reason, he has refused
to cooperate with my office in this investigation. The New
York Times reported on February 26th that "Mr. Andrews
said he had not talked to Mr. Garrison because such talk might
be dangerous, but added that he believed he was being 'tailed.'"
Andrews told our grand jury that he could not say Clay Shaw was
Clay Bertrand and he could not say he wasn't. But the day after
NBC's special, Andrews broke his silence and said, yes, Clay
Shaw is not Clem Bertrand and identified the real Clay Bertrand
as Eugene Davis. The only trouble is, Andrews and Davis have
known each other for years and have been seen frequently in each
other's company. Andrews has lied so often and about so many
aspects of this case that the New Orleans Parish grand jury has
indicted him for perjury. I feel sorry for him, since he's afraid
of getting a bullet in his head, but he's going to have to go
to trial for perjury. [Andrews has since been convicted.]

PLAYBOY: You expressed your
reaction to the NBC show in concrete terms on July seventh, when
you formally charged Walter Sheridan, the network's special investigator
for the broadcast, with attempting to bribe your witness Perry
Russo. Do you really have a case against Sheridan, or is this
just a form of harassment?

GARRISON: The reason we haven't
lost a major case in over five years in office is that we do
not charge a man unless we can make it stick in court. And I'm
not in the business of harassing anybody. Sheridan was charged
because evidence was brought to us indicating that he attempted
to bribe Perry Russo by offering him free transportation to California,
free lodgings and a job once there, payment of all legal fees
in any extradition proceedings and immunity from my office. Mr.
Russo has stated that Sheridan asked his help "to wreck
the Garrison investigation" and "offered to set me
up in California, protect my job and guarantee that Garrison
would never get me extradited." According to Russo, Sheridan
added that both NBC and the CIA were out to scuttle my case.
I think it's significant that the chief investigator for this
ostensibly objective broadcast starts telling people the day
he arrives in town that he is going to "destroy Garrison"
-- this at the same time he is unctuously assuring me that NBC
wanted only the truth and he had an entirely open mind on my
case. Let me tell you something about Walter Sheridan's background,
and maybe you'll understand his true role in all this. Sheridan
was one of the bright, hard young investigators who entered the
Justice Department under Bobby Kennedy. He was assigned to nail
Jimmy Hoffa. Sheridan employed a wide variety of highly questionable
tactics in the Justice Department's relentless drive against
Hoffa; he was recently subpoenaed to testify in connection with
charges that he wire-tapped the offices of Hoffa's associates
and then played back incriminating tapes to them, warning that
unless they testified for the Government, they would be destroyed
along with Hoffa. A few years ago, Sheridan left the Justice
Department -- officially, at least -- and went to work for NBC.
No honest reporter out for a story would have so completely prejudged
the situation and been willing to employ such tactics. I think
it's likely that in his zeal to destroy my case, he exceeded
the authority granted him by NBC's executives in New York. I
get the impression that the majority of NBC executives probably
thought Sheridan's team came down here in an uncompromising search
for the truth. When Sheridan overstepped himself and it became
obvious that the broadcast was, to say the least, not objective,
NBC realized it was in a touchy position. Cooler heads prevailed
and I was allowed to present our case to the American people.
For that, at least, I'm singularly grateful to Walter Sheridan.

PLAYBOY: How do you respond
to the charge of your critics -- including NBC -- that you launched
this probe for political reasons, hoping the attendant publicity
would be a springboard to a Senate seat or to the governorship?

GARRISON: I'd have to be a terribly
cynical and corrupt man to place another human being on trial
for conspiracy to murder the President of the United States just
to gratify my political ambition. But I guess there are a lot
of people around the country, especially after NBC's attack,
who think that's just the kind of man I am. That rather saddens
me. I'm no Albert Schweitzer, but I could never do a thing like
that. I derive no pleasure from prosecuting a man, even though
I know he's guilty; do you think I could sleep at night or look
at myself in the mirror in the morning if I hounded an innocent
man? You know, I always received much more satisfaction as a
defense attorney in obtaining an acquittal for a client than
I ever have as a D.A. in obtaining a conviction. All my interests
and sympathies tend to be on the side of the individual as opposed
to the state. So this is really the worst charge that anyone
could make against me -- that in order to get my name in the
paper, or to advance politically, I would destroy another human
being. This kind of charge reveals a good deal about the personality
of the people who make it; to impute such motives to another
man is to imply you're harboring them yourself. But to look at
a different aspect of your question, I'm inclined to challenge
the whole premise that launching an investigation like this holds
any political advantages for me. A politically ambitious man
would hardly be likely to challenge the massed power of the Federal
Government and criticize so many honorable figures and distinguished
agencies. Actually, this charge is an argument in favor of my
investigation: Would such a slimy type, eager to profiteer on
the assassination, jeopardize his political ambitions if he didn't
have an ironclad case? If I were really the ambitious monster
they paint me, why would I climb out on such a limb and then
saw it off? Unless he had the facts, it would be the last thing
a politically ambitious man would do. I was perfectly aware that
I might have signed my political death warrant the moment I launched
this case -- but I couldn't care less as long as I can shed some
light on John Kennedy's assassination. As a matter of fact, after
this last murderous year, I find myself thinking more and more
about returning to private life and having time to read again,
to get out in the sun and hit a golf ball. But before I do that,
I'm going to break this case and let the public know the truth.
I won't quit before that day. I wouldn't give the bastards the
satisfaction.

PLAYBOY: According to your own
former chief investigator, William Gurvich, the truth about the
assassination has already been published in the Warren Report.
After leaving your staff last June, he announced, "If there
is any truth to any of Garrison's charges about there being a
conspiracy, I haven't been able to find it." When members
of your own staff have no faith in your case, how do you expect
the public to be impressed?

GARRISON: First of all, I won't
deny for a minute that for at least three months I trusted Bill
Gurvich implicitly. He was never my "chief investigator"
-- that's his own terminology -- because there was no such position
on my staff while he worked for me. But two days before Christmas
1966, Gurvich, who operates a private detective agency, visited
my office and told me he'd heard of my investigation and thought
I was doing a wonderful job. He presented me with a beautiful
color-TV set and asked if he could be of use in any capacity.
Well, right then and there, I should have sat back and asked
myself a few searching questions -- like how he had heard of
my probe in the first place, since only the people we were questioning
and a few of my staff, as far as I knew, were aware of what was
going on at that time. We had been under way for only five weeks,
remember. And I should also have recalled the old adage about
Greeks bearing gifts. But I was desperately understaffed -- I
had only six aides available to work on the assassination inquiry
full time -- and here comes a trained private investigator offering
his services free of charge. It was like a gift from the gods.
So I set Gurvich to work; and for the next couple of months,
he did an adequate job of talking to witnesses, taking photographs,
etc. But then, around March, I learned that he had been seeing
Walter Sheridan of NBC. Well, this didn't bother me at first,
because I didn't know then the role Sheridan was playing in this
whole affair. But after word got back to me from my witnesses
about Sheridan's threats and harassment, I began keeping a closer
eye on Bill. I still didn't really think he was any kind of a
double agent, but I couldn't help wondering why he was rubbing
elbows with people like that. Now, don't forget that Gurvich
claims he became totally disgusted with our investigation at
the time of Clay Shaw's arrest -- yet for several months afterward
he continued to wax enthusiastic about every aspect of our case,
and I have a dozen witnesses who will testify to that effect.
I guess this was something that should have tipped me off about
Bill: He was always enthusiastic, never doubtful or cautionary,
even when I or one of my staff threw out a hypothesis that on
reflection we realized was wrong. And I began to notice how he
would pick my mind for every scrap of fact pertaining to the
case. So I grew suspicious and took him off the sensitive areas
of the investigation and relegated him to chauffeuring and routine
clerical duties. This seemed to really bother him, and every
day he would come into my office and pump me for information,
complaining that he wasn't being told enough about the case.
I still had nothing concrete against him and I didn't want to
be unjust, but I guess my manner must have cooled perceptibly,
because one day about two months before he surfaced in Washington,
Bill just vanished from our sight. And with him, I'm sorry to
confess, vanished a copy of our master file. How do you explain
such behavior? It's possible that Bill joined us initially for
reasons of opportunism, seeing a chance to get in at the beginning
of an earth-shaking case, and subsequently chickened out when
he saw the implacable determination of some powerful agencies
to destroy our investigation and discredit everyone associated
with it. But I really don't believe Bill is that much of a coward.
It's also possible that those who want to prevent an investigation
learned early what we were doing and made a decision to plant
somebody on the inside of the investigation. Let me stress that
I have no secret documents or monitored telephone calls to support
this hypothesis; it just seems to me the most logical explanation
for Bill's behavior. Let me put it this way: If you were in charge
of the CIA and willing to spend scores of millions of dollars
on such relatively penny-ante projects as infiltrating the National
Students Association, wouldn't you make an effort to infiltrate
an investigation that could seriously damage the prestige of
your agency?

PLAYBOY: How could your probe
damage the prestige of the CIA and cause them to take countermeasures
against you?

GARRISON: For the simple reason
that a number of the men who killed the President were former
employees of the CIA involved in its anti-Castro underground
activities in and around New Orleans. The CIA knows their identity.
So do I -- and our investigation has established this without
the shadow of a doubt. Let me stress one thing, however: We have
no evidence that any official of the CIA was involved with the
conspiracy that led to the President's death.

PLAYBOY: Do you lend no credence,
then, to the charges of a former CIA agent, J. Garrett Underhill,
that there was a conspiracy within the CIA to assassinate Kennedy?

GARRISON: I've become familiar
with the case of Gary Underhill, and I've been able to ascertain
that he was not the type of man to make wild or unsubstantiated
charges. Underhill was an intelligence agent in World War Two
and an expert on military affairs whom the Pentagon considered
one of the country's top authorities on limited warfare. He was
on good personal terms with the top brass in the Defense Department
and the ranking officials in the CIA. He wasn't a full-time CIA
agent, but he occasionally performed "special assignments"
for the Agency. Several days after the President's assassination,
Underhill appeared at the home of friends in New Jersey, apparently
badly shaken, and charged that Kennedy was killed by a small
group within the CIA. He told friends he believed his own life
was in danger. We can't learn any more from Underhill, I'm afraid,
because shortly afterward, he was found shot to death in his
Washington apartment. The coroner ruled suicide, but he had been
shot behind the left ear and the pistol was found under his left
side -- and Underhill was right-handed.

PLAYBOY: Do you believe Underhill
was murdered to silence him?

GARRISON: I don't believe it
and I don't disbelieve it. All I know is that witnesses with
vital evidence in this case are certainly bad insurance risks.
In the absence of further and much more conclusive evidence to
the contrary, however, we must assume that the plotters were
acting on their own rather than on CIA orders when they killed
the President. As far as we have been able to determine, they
were not in the pay of the CIA at the time of the assassination
-- and this is one of the reasons the President was murdered:
I'll explain later what I mean by that. But the CIA could not
face up to the American people and admit that its former employees
had conspired to assassinate the President; so from the moment
Kennedy's heart stopped beating, the Agency attempted to sweep
the whole conspiracy under the rug. The CIA has spared neither
time nor the taxpayers' money in its efforts to hide the truth
about the assassination from the American people. In this respect,
it has become an accessory after the fact in the assassination.

PLAYBOY: Do you have any conclusive
evidence to support these accusations?

GARRISON: I've never revealed
this before, but for at least six months, my office and home
telephones -- and those of every member of my staff -- have been
monitored. If there is as little substance to this investigation
as the press and the Government allege, why would anyone go to
all that trouble? I leave it to your judgment if the monitoring
of our phones is the work of the Women's Christian Temperance
Union or the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce.

PLAYBOY: That's hardly conclusive
evidence.

GARRISON: I'd need a book to
list all the indications. But let's start with the fact that
most of the attorneys for the hostile witnesses and defendants
were hired by the CIA -- through one or another of its covers.
For example, a New Orleans lawyer representing Alvin Beauboeuf,
who has charged me with every kind of unethical practice except
child molesting -- I expect that allegation to come shortly before
Shaw's trial -- flew with Beauboeuf to Washington immediately
after my office subpoenaed him, where Beauboeuf was questioned
by a "retired" intelligence officer in the offices
of the Justice Department. This trip was paid for, as are the
lawyer's legal fees, by the CIA -- in other words, with our tax
dollars. Another lawyer, Stephen Plotkin, who represents Gordon
Novel [another of Garrison's key witnesses], has admitted he
is paid by the CIA -- and has also admitted his client
is a CIA agent; you may have seen that story on page 96 of The
New York Times, next to ship departures. Plotkin, incidentally,
sued me for $10,000,000 for defaming his client and sued a group
of New Orleans businessmen financing my investigation for $50,000,000
-- which meant, in effect, that the CIA was suing us. As if they
need the money. But my attorney filed a motion for a deposition
to be taken from Novel, which meant that he would have to return
to my jurisdiction to file his suit and thus be liable for questioning
in the conspiracy case. Rather than come down to New Orleans
and face the music, Novel dropped his suit and sacrificed a possible
$60,000,000 judgment. Now, there's a man of principle; he knows
there are some things more important than money.

PLAYBOY: Do you also believe
Clay Shaw's lawyers are being paid by the CIA?

GARRISON: I can't comment directly
on that, since it relates to Shaw's trial. But I think the clincher,
as far as Washington's obstruction of our probe goes, is the
consistent refusal of the Federal Government to make accessible
to us any information about the roles of the CIA, anti-Castro
Cuban exiles and the para-military right in the assassination.
There is, without doubt, a conspiracy by elements of the Federal
Government to keep the facts of this case from ever becoming
known -- a conspiracy that is the logical extension of the initial
conspiracy by the CIA to conceal vital evidence from the Warren
Commission.

PLAYBOY: What "vital evidence"
did the CIA withhold from the Warren Commission?

GARRISON: A good example is
Commission Exhibit number 237. This is a photograph of a stocky,
balding, middle-aged man published without explanation or identification
in the 26 volumes of the Warren Report. There's a significant
story behind Exhibit number 237. Throughout the late summer and
fall of 1963, Lee Oswald was shepherded in Dallas and New Orleans
by a CIA "baby sitter" who watched over Oswald's activities
and stayed with him. My office knows who he is and what he looks
like.

PLAYBOY: Are you implying that
Oswald was working for the CIA?

GARRISON: Let me finish and
you can decide for yourself. When Oswald went to Mexico City
in an effort to obtain a visa for travel to Cuba, this CIA agent
accompanied him. Now, at this particular time, Mexico was the
only Latin-American nation maintaining diplomatic ties with Cuba,
and leftists and Communists from all over the hemisphere traveled
to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City for visas to Cuba. The CIA,
quite properly, had placed a hidden movie camera in a building
across the street from the embassy and filmed everyone coming
and going. The Warren Commission, knowing this, had an assistant
legal counsel ask the FBI for a picture of Oswald and his companion
on the steps of the embassy, and the FBI, in turn, filed an affidavit
saying they had obtained the photo in question from the CIA.
The only trouble is that the CIA supplied the Warren Commission
with a phony photograph. The photograph of an "unidentified
man" published in the 26 volumes is not the man who was
filmed with Oswald on the steps of the Cuban Embassy, as alleged
by the CIA. It's perfectly clear that the actual picture of Oswald
and his companion was suppressed and a fake photo substituted
because the second man in the picture was working for the CIA
in 1963, and his identification as a CIA agent would have opened
up a whole can of worms about Oswald's ties with the Agency.
To prevent this, the CIA presented the Warren Commission with
fraudulent evidence -- a pattern that repeats itself whenever
the CIA submits evidence relating to Oswald's possible connection
with any U.S. intelligence agency. The CIA lied to the Commission
right down the line; and since the Warren Commission had no investigative
staff of its own but had to rely on the FBI, the Secret Service
and the CIA for its evidence, it's understandable why the Commission
concluded that Oswald had no ties with American intelligence
agencies.

PLAYBOY: What was the nature
of these ties?

GARRISON: That's not altogether
clear, at least insofar as his specific assignments are concerned;
but we do have proof that Oswald was recruited by the CIA in
his Marine Corps days, when he was mysteriously schooled in Russian
and allowed to subscribe to Pravda. And shortly before his trip
to the Soviet Union, we have learned, Oswald was trained as an
intelligence agent at the CIA installation at Japan's Atsugi
Air Force Base -- which may explain why no disciplinary action
was taken against him when he returned to the U.S. from the Soviet
Union, even though he had supposedly defected with top-secret
information about our radar networks. The money he used to return
to the U.S., incidentally, was advanced to him by the State Department.

PLAYBOY: In an article for Ramparts,
ex-FBI agent William Turner indicated that White Russian refugee
George De Mohrenschildt may have been Oswald's CIA "baby
sitter" in Dallas. Have you found any links between the
CIA and De Mohrenschildt?

GARRISON: I can't comment directly
on that, but George De Mohrenschildt is certainly an enigmatic
and intriguing character. Here you have a wealthy, cultured White
Russian émigré who travels in the highest social
circles -- he was a personal friend of Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss,
Jackie Kennedy's mother -- suddenly developing an intimate relationship
with an impoverished ex-Marine like Lee Oswald. What did they
discuss -- last year's season at Biarritz, or how to beat the
bank at Monte Carlo? And Mr. De Mohrenschildt has a penchant
for popping up in the most interesting places at the most interesting
times -- for example, in Haiti just before a joint Cuban exile-CIA
venture to topple Duvalier and use the island as a springboard
for an invasion of Cuba; and in Guatemala, another CIA training
ground, the day before the Bay of Pigs invasion. We have a good
deal more information about Oswald's CIA contacts in Dallas and
New Orleans -- most of which we discovered by sheer chance --
but there are still whole areas of inquiry blocked from us by
the CIA's refusal to cooperate with our investigation. For public
consumption, the CIA claims not to have been concerned with Oswald
prior to the assassination. But one thing is certain: Despite
these pious protestations, the CIA was very much aware of Oswald's
activities well before the President's murder. In a notarized
affidavit, State Department officer James D. Crowley states,
"The first time I remember learning of Oswald's existence
was when I received copies of a telegraphic message from the
Central Intelligence Agency dated October 10, 1963, which contained
information pertaining to his current activities." It would
certainly be interesting to know what the CIA knew about Oswald
six weeks before the assassination, but the contents of this
particular message never reached the Warren Commission and remain
a complete mystery. There are also 51 CIA documents classified
top secret in the National Archives pertaining to Lee Oswald
and Jack Ruby. Technically, the members of the Commission had
access to them; but in practice, any document the CIA wanted
classified was shunted into the Archives without examination
by the sleeping beauties on the Commission. Twenty-nine of these
files are of particular interest, because their titles alone
indicate that the CIA had extensive information on Oswald and
Ruby before the assassination. A few of these documents are:
CD 347, "Activity of Oswald in Mexico City"; CD 1054,
"Information on Jack Ruby and Associates"; CD 692,
"Reproduction of Official CIA Dossier on Oswald"; CD
1551, "Conversations Between Cuban President and Ambassador";
CD 698, "Reports of Travel and Activities of Oswald";
CD 943, "Allegations of Pfc. Eugene Dinkin re Assassination
Plot"; and CD 971, "Telephone Calls to U.S. Embassy,
Canberra, Australia, re Planned Assassination." The titles
of these documents are all we have to go on, but they're certainly
intriguing. For example, the public has heard nothing about phone
calls to the U.S. Embassy in Canberra, warning in advance of
the assassination, nor have we been told anything about a Pfc.
Dinkin who claims to have knowledge of an assassination plot.
One of the top-secret files that most intrigues me is CD 931,
which is entitled "Oswald's Access to Information About
the U-2." I have 24 years of military experience behind
me, on active duty and in the reserves, and I've never had any
access to the U-2; in fact, I've never seen one. But apparently
this "self-proclaimed Marxist," Lee Harvey Oswald,
who we're assured had no ties to any Government agency, had access
to information about the nation's most secret high-altitude reconnaissance
plane. Of course, it may be that none of these CIA files reveals
anything sinister about Lee Harvey Oswald or hints in any way
that he was employed by our Government. But then, why are the
51 CIA documents classified top secret in the Archives and inaccessible
to the public for 75 years? I'm 45, so there's no hope for me,
but I'm already training my eight-year-old son to keep himself
physically fit so that on one glorious September morn in 2038
he can walk into the National Archives in Washington and find
out what the CIA knew about Lee Harvey Oswald. If there's a further
extension of the top-secret classification, this may become a
generational affair, with questions passed down from father to
son in the manner of the ancient runic bards. But someday, perhaps,
we'll find out what Oswald was doing messing around with the
U-2. Of course, there are some CIA documents we'll never see.
When the Warren Commission asked to see a secret CIA memo on
Oswald's activities in Russia that had been attached to a State
Department letter on Oswald's Russian stay, word came back that
the Agency was terribly sorry, but the secret memo had been destroyed
while being photocopied. This unfortunate accident took place
on November 23, 1963, a day on which there must have occurred
a great deal of spontaneous combustion around Washington.

PLAYBOY: John A. McCone, former
director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has said of Oswald:
"The Agency never contacted him, interviewed him, talked
with him or received or solicited any reports or information
from him or communicated with him in any manner. Lee Harvey Oswald
was never associated or connected directly or indirectly, in
any way whatsoever, with the Agency." Why do you refuse
to accept McCone's word?

GARRISON: The head of the CIA,
it seems to me, would think long and hard before he admitted
that former employees of his had been involved in the murder
of the President of the United States -- even if they weren't
acting on behalf of the Agency when they did it. In any case,
the CIA's past record hardly induces faith in the Agency's veracity.
CIA officials lied about their role in the overthrow of the Arbenz
Guzman regime in Guatemala; they lied about their role in the
overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran; they lied about their role in
the abortive military revolt against Sukarno in 1958; they lied
about the U-2 incident; and they certainly lied about the Bay
of Pigs. If the CIA is ready to lie even about its successes
-- as in Guatemala and Iran -- do you seriously believe its director
would tell the truth in a case as explosive as this? Of course,
CIA officials grow so used to lying, so steeped in deceit, that
after a while I think they really become incapable of distinguishing
truth and falsehood. Or, in an Orwellian sense, perhaps they
come to believe that truth is what contributes to national security,
and falsehood is anything detrimental to national security. John
McCone would swear he's a Croatian dwarf if he thought it would
advance the interests of the CIA -- which he automatically equates
with the national interest.

PLAYBOY: Let's get down to the
facts of the assassination, as you see them. When -- and why
-- did you begin to doubt the conclusions of the Warren Report?

GARRISON: Until as recently
as November of 1966, I had complete faith in the Warren Report.
As a matter of fact, I viewed its most vocal critics with the
same skepticism that much of the press now views me -- which
is why I can't condemn the mass media too harshly for their cynical
approach, except in the handful of cases where newsmen seem to
be in active collusion with Washington to torpedo our investigation.
Of course, my faith in the Report was grounded in ignorance,
since I had never read it; as Mark Lane says, "The only
way you can believe the Report is not to have read it."
But then, in November, I visited New York City with Senator Russell
Long; and when the subject of the assassination came up, he expressed
grave doubts about the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee
Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. Now, this disturbed me,
because here was the Majority Whip of the U.S. Senate speaking,
not some publicity hound with an ideological ax to grind; and
if at this late juncture he still entertained serious reservations
about the Commission's determinations, maybe there was more to
the assassination than met the eye. So I began reading every
book and magazine article on the assassination I could get my
hands on -- my tombstone may be inscribed "Curiosity Killed
The D.A." -- and I found my own doubts growing. Finally,
I put aside all other business and started to wade through the
Warren Commission's own 26 volumes of supportive evidence and
testimony. That was the clincher. It's impossible for anyone
possessed of reasonable objectivity and a fair degree of intelligence
to read those 26 volumes and not reach the conclusion that the
Warren Commission was wrong in every one of its major conclusions
pertaining to the assassination. For me, that was the end of
innocence.

PLAYBOY: Do you mean to imply
that the Warren Commission deliberately concealed or falsified
the facts of the assassination?

GARRISON: No, you don't need
any explanation more sinister than incompetence to account for
the Warren Report. Though I didn't know it at the time, the Commission
simply didn't have all the facts, and many of those they had
were fraudulent, as I've pointed out -- thanks to the evidence
withheld and manufactured by the CIA. If you add to this the
fact that most of the Commission members had already presumed
Oswald's guilt and were merely looking for facts to confirm it
-- and in the process tranquilize the American public -- you'll
realize why the Commission was such a dismal failure. But in
the final analysis, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference
whether the Commission members were sincere patriots or mountebanks;
the question is whether Lee Oswald killed the President alone
and unaided; if the evidence doesn't support that conclusion
-- and it doesn't -- a thousand honorable men sitting shoulder
to shoulder along the banks of the Potomac won't change the facts.

PLAYBOY: So you began your investigation
of the President's assassination on nothing stronger than you
own doubts and the theories of the Commission's critics?

GARRISON: No, please don't put
words in my mouth. The works of the critics -- particularly Edward
Epstein, Harold Weisberg and Mark Lane -- sparked my general
doubts about the assassination; but more importantly, they led
me into specific areas of inquiry. After I realized that something
was seriously wrong, I had no alternative but to face the fact
that Oswald had arrived in Dallas only a short time before the
assassination and that prior to that time he had lived in New
Orleans for over six months. I became curious about what this
alleged assassin was doing while under my jurisdiction, and my
staff began an investigation of Oswald's activities and contacts
in the New Orleans area. We interviewed people the Warren Commission
had never questioned, and a whole new world began opening up.
As I studied Oswald's movements in Dallas, my mind turned back
to the aftermath of the assassination in 1963, when my office
questioned three men -- David Ferrie, Alvin Beauboeuf and Melvin
Coffey -- on suspicion of being involved in the assassination.
I began to wonder if we hadn't dismissed these three men too
lightly, and we reopened our investigation into their activities.

PLAYBOY: Why did you become
interested in Ferrie and his associates in November 1963?

GARRISON: To explain that, I'll
have to tell you something about the operation of our office.
I believe we have one of the best district attorney's offices
in the country. We have no political appointments and, as a result,
there's a tremendous amount of esprit among our staff and an
enthusiasm for looking into unanswered questions. That's why
we got together the day after the assassination and began examining
our files and checking out every political extremist, religious
fanatic and kook who had ever come to our attention. And one
of the names that sprang into prominence was that of David Ferrie.
When we checked him out, as we were doing with innumerable other
suspicious characters, we discovered that on November 22nd he
had traveled to Texas to go "duck hunting" and "ice
skating. Well, naturally, this sparked our interest. We staked
out his house and we questioned his friends, and when he came
back -- the first thing he did on his return, incidentally, was
to contact a lawyer and then hide out for the night at a friend's
room in another town -- we pulled him and his two companions
in for questioning. The story of Ferrie's activities that emerged
was rather curious. He drove nine hours through a furious thunderstorm
to Texas, then apparently gave up his plans to go duck hunting
and instead went to an ice-skating rink in Houston and stood
waiting beside a pay telephone for two hours; he never put the
skates on. We felt his movements were suspicious enough to justify
his arrest and that of his friends, and we took them into custody.
When we alerted the FBI, they expressed interest and asked us
to turn the three men over to them for questioning. We did, but
Ferrie was released soon afterward and most of its report on
him was classified top secret and secreted in the National Archives,
where it will remain inaccessible to the public until September
2038 A.D. No one, including me, can see those pages.

PLAYBOY: Why do you believe
the FBI report on Ferrie is classified?

GARRISON: For the same reason
the President's autopsy X rays and photos and other vital evidence
in this case are classified -- because they would indicate the
existence of a conspiracy, involving former employees of the
CIA, to kill the President.

PLAYBOY: When you resumed your
investigation of Ferrie three years later, did you discover any
new evidence?

GARRISON: We discovered a whole
mare's-nest of underground activity involving the CIA, elements
of the paramilitary right and militant anti-Castro exile groups.
We discovered links between David Ferrie, Lee Oswald and Jack
Ruby. We discovered, in short, what I had hoped not to find,
despite my doubts about the Warren Commission -- the existence
of a well-organized conspiracy to assassinate John Kennedy, a
conspiracy that came to fruition in Dallas on November 22, 1963,
and in which David Ferrie played a vital role.

PLAYBOY: Accepting for a moment
your contention that there was a conspiracy to assassinate President
John Kennedy, have you been able to discover who was involved
-- in addition to Ferrie -- how it was done and why?

GARRISON: Yes, I have. President
Kennedy was killed for one reason: because he was working for
a reconciliation with the U.S.S.R. and Castro's Cuba. His assassins
were a group of fanatic anti-Communists with a fusion of interests
in preventing Kennedy from achieving peaceful relations with
the Communist world. On the operative level of the conspiracy,
you find anti-Castro Cuban exiles who never forgave Kennedy for
failing to send in U.S. air cover at the Bay of Pigs and who
feared that the thaw following the Missile Crisis in October
1962 augured the total frustration of their plans to liberate
Cuba. They believed sincerely that Kennedy had sold them out
to the Communists. On a higher, control level, you find a number
of people of ultra-right-wing persuasion -- not simply conservatives,
mind you, but people who could be described as neo-Nazi, including
a small clique that had defected from the Minutemen because it
considered the group "too liberal." These elements
had their canteens ready and their guns loaded; they lacked only
a target. After Kennedy's domestic moves toward racial integration
and his attempts to forge a peaceful foreign policy, as exemplified
by his signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, they found that
target. So both of these groups had a vital stake in changing
U.S. foreign policy -- ideological on the part of the paramilitary
rightists and both ideological and personal with the anti-Castro
exiles, many of whom felt they would never see their homes again
if Kennedy's policy of détente was allowed to succeed.
The CIA was involved with both of these groups. In the New Orleans
area, where the conspiracy was hatched, the CIA was training
a mixed bag of Minutemen, Cuban exiles and other anti-Castro
adventurers north of Lake Pontchartrain for a foray into Cuba
and an assassination attempt on Fidel Castro. David Ferrie, who
operated on the "command" level of the ultra-rightists,
was deeply involved in this effort. The CIA itself apparently
did not take the détente too seriously until the
late summer of 1963, because it maintained its financing and
training of anti-Castro adventurers. There was, in fact, a triangulation
of CIA-supported anti-Castro activity between Dallas -- where
Jack Ruby was involved in collecting guns and ammunition for
the underground -- and Miami and New Orleans, where most of the
training was going on. But then, Kennedy, who had signed a secret
agreement with Khrushchev after the Missile Crisis pledging not
to invade Cuba if Russia would soft-pedal Castro's subversive
activities in the Americas, began to crackdown on CIA operations
against Cuba. As a result, on July 31, 1963, the FBI raided the
headquarters of the group of Cuban exiles and Minutemen training
north of Lake Pontchartrain and confiscated all their guns and
ammunition -- despite the fact that the operation had the sanction
of the CIA. This action may have sealed Kennedy's fate.

By the early fall of 1963, Kennedy's plan for a détente
with Cuba was in high gear. Ambassador William Attwood, a close
personal friend of the late President, recounts that a thaw in
U.S.-Cuban relations was definitely in the works at this time
and "the President more than the State Department was interested
in exploring the [Cuban] overture." One of the intermediaries
between Castro and Kennedy was the late television commentator
Lisa Howard, who met secretly with Ernesto Che Guevara to prepare
peace terms between the U.S. and Castro. Miss Howard was arranging
a conference between Bobby Kennedy and Guevara when the President
was shot in Dallas. In a United Nations speech on October 7,
1963, Adlai Stevenson set forth the possibility of a termination
of hostilities between the two countries, and on November 19th.
Presidential aide McGeorge Bundy, who was acting as an intermediary
in the secret discussions, told Ambassador Attwood that the President
wanted to discuss his plans for a Cuban-American détente
in depth with him right after "a brief trip to Dallas."
The rest is history. One of the two heads of state involved in
negotiating that detente is now dead, but the survivor, Fidel
Castro, said on November 23rd that the assassination was the
work of "elements in the U.S. opposed to peace," and
the Cuban Foreign Ministry officially charged that "the
Kennedy assassination was a provocation against world peace perfectly
and minutely prepared by the most reactionary sectors of the
United States." Most Americans at the time, myself included,
thought this was just Communist propaganda. But Castro knew what
he was talking about. A few weeks after the assassination, the
Cuban ambassador to the UN, Dr. Carlos Lechuga, was instructed
by Castro to begin "formal discussions" in the hope
that Kennedy's peace plan would be carried on by his successor.
Ambassador Attwood writes that "I informed Bundy and later
was told that the Cuban exercise would be put on ice for a while
-- which it was and where it has been ever since." The assassins
had achieved their aim.

PLAYBOY: This is interesting
speculation, but isn't that all it is -- speculation?

GARRISON: No, because we know
enough about the key individuals involved in the conspiracy --
Latins and Americans alike -- to know that this was their motive
for the murder of John Kennedy. First of all, you have to understand
the mentality of these people. Take the Cuban exiles involved;
here are men, some of whom survived the Bay of Pigs, who for
years had been whipped up by the CIA into a frenzy of anti-Castro
hatred and who had been solemnly assured by American intelligence
agencies that they were going to liberate their homeland with
American support. They had one disappointment after another --
the Bay of Pigs debacle, the failure to invade Cuba during the
Missile Crisis, the effective crushing of their underground in
Cuba by Castro's secret police. But they kept on hoping, and
the CIA kept fanning their hopes. Then they listened to Kennedy's
famous speech at American University on June 10, 1963, where
he really kicked off the new drive for a détente, and
they heard the President of the country in which they'd placed
all their hope saying we must make peace with the Communists,
since "we both breathe the same air." Well, this worries
them, but the CIA continues financing and training their underground
cadres, so there is still hope. And then suddenly, in the late
summer of 1963, the CIA is forced by Presidential pressure to
withdraw all funds and assistance from the Cuban exiles. Think
of the impact of this, particularly on the group here in New
Orleans, which had been trained for months to make an assassination
attempt on Castro and then found itself coolly jettisoned by
its benefactors in Washington. These adventurers were worked
up to a fever pitch; and when the CIA withdrew its support and
they couldn't fight Castro, they picked their next victim --
John F. Kennedy. That, in a nutshell, is the genesis of the assassination.
President Kennedy died because he wanted peace.

PLAYBOY: How many people do
you claim were involved in this alleged conspiracy?

GARRISON: Too many for their
own security. If they had let fewer men in on the plot, we might
never have stumbled onto it. But let me add one additional point
here: The brief account I've just given you shouldn't be construed
to indicate that any of the legitimate anti-Castro organizations
were involved in the assassination -- or that all Minutemen were
implicated. Nor should the fact that there was a conspiracy from
the paramilitary right be used to start a witch-hunt against
conservatives in general, any more than Oswald's phony pro-Communist
record should have been used to purge leftists from our national
life. In this case, the very terminology of "right"
and "left," which is essentially an economic definition,
has little validity as a description of those fanatic war lovers
who were ready to assassinate a President because he worked for
peace. If you go far enough to either extreme of the political
spectrum, Communist or fascist, you'll find hard-eyed men with
guns who believe that anybody who doesn't think as they do should
be incarcerated or exterminated. The assassination was less an
ideological exercise than the frenzied revenge of a sick element
in our society on a man who exemplified health and decency.

PLAYBOY: You've outlined the
genesis of the alleged conspiracy as you see it. Will you now
tell us how it was carried out -- and by whom?

GARRISON: I won't be able to
name names in all instances, because we're building cases against
a number of the individuals involved. But I'll give you a brief
sketch of how the conspiracy was organized, and then point by
point we can go into the participants we know about so far and
the role we believe each played. Let me stress at the outset
that what I'm going to tell you is not idle speculation; we have
facts, documents and reliable eyewitness testimony to corroborate
much of it -- though I can't lay all this evidence before you
without jeopardizing the investigation. But there are many pieces
of the jigsaw puzzle still missing. Not one of the conspirators
has confessed his guilt, so we don't yet have an "inside"
view of all the pre-assassination planning. In order to fill
in these gaps for you, I'll have to indulge in a bit of informed
deduction and surmise. It may sound melodramatic, but you can
best envisage the plot as a spider's web. At the center sit the
organizers of the operation, men with close ties to U.S. and
western-European intelligence agencies. One of them is a former
associate of Jack Ruby in gun-smuggling activities and a dedicated
neo-Nazi in close contact with neo-fascist movements in Great
Britain, Germany, France and Italy. Radiating out from these
key men, the strands of the web include a motley group of political
adventurers united only in their detestation of Kennedy and their
dedication to the reversal of his foreign policy. One such man
was David Ferrie. Another member of this group is an individual
who deliberately impersonated Lee Oswald before the assassination
in order to incriminate him: we believe we know his identity.
Several others, about whom we have evidence indicating that they
helped supply weapons to the plotters, were the right-wing extremists
I mentioned earlier who broke off from a fanatic paramilitary
group because it was becoming "too liberal." Also involved
is a band of anti-Castro adventurers who functioned on the second,
or "operative," level of the conspiracy. These men
include two Cuban exiles, one of whom failed a lie-detector test
when he denied knowing in advance that Kennedy was going to be
killed or having seen the weapons to be used in the assassination
-- and a number of men who fired at the President from three
directions on November 22nd. The link between the "command"
level and the Cuban exiles was an amorphous group called the
Free Cuba Committee, which with CIA sanction had begun training
north of Lake Pontchartrain for an assassination attempt on Fidel
Castro, as I mentioned earlier. It was this group that was raided
by the FBI on July 31st, 1963, and temporarily put out of commission.
Our information indicates that it was shortly after this setback
that the group switched direction and decided to assassinate
John Kennedy instead of Fidel Castro, after the "betrayal"
of the Bay of Pigs disaster. That's it in a nutshell, but I think
the development of the conspiracy will become clearer if you
ask me one by one about the individuals involved.

PLAYBOY: All right, let's begin
with Clay Shaw. What was his role in the alleged conspiracy?

GARRISON: I'm afraid I can't
comment even inferentially on anything pertaining to the evidence
against Mr. Shaw, since he's facing trial in my jurisdiction.

PLAYBOY: Can you answer a charge
about your case against him? On March second of this year, shortly
after Shaw's arrest, Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced
that Shaw "was included in an investigation in November
and December of 1963 and on the evidence that the FBI has, there
was no connection found between Shaw and the President's assassination."
Why do you challenge the Attorney General's statement?

GARRISON: Because it was not
true. The FBI did not clear Clay Shaw after the assassination.
You don't have to take my word for it; The New York Times
reported on June third that "The Justice Department said
today that Clay Shaw. New Orleans businessman, was not investigated
by the Federal Bureau of Investigation ... The statement contradicted
Attorney General Ramsey Clark ... A Justice Department spokesman
said that Mr. Clark's statement last March second was in error."
Now, the Attorney General's attempt to whitewash Shaw via the
FBI, as you pointed out, was made immediately after our office
arrested him, and it really constituted the first salvo of the
propaganda barrage laid down against us. The natural reaction
of many people across the country to Clark's statement, which
was carried prominently on TV and in the press was, "Well,
if the FBI cleared him, there can't be anything to this whole
conspiracy business." Most defendants have to wait for trial
before they're allowed to produce character witnesses. When,
three months later, the Justice Department finally admitted Clark
was "in error," the story appeared in only a few newspapers
and wasn't picked up by the radio or TV networks. But what was
even more significant about the Justice Department's attempt
to bail out Shaw was the fact that the day after Clark's statement,
The New York Times' Washington correspondent. Robert B.
Semple, Jr., reported that he had been told by an unnamed Justice
Department spokesman that his agency was convinced "that
Mr. Bertrand and Mr. Shaw were the same man" -- and that
was the reason Clark released his untrue story about the FBI's
having cleared Shaw! In other words, knowing that our case was
based on fact, the Justice Department deliberately dragged a
red herring across the trail.

PLAYBOY: Are you free to discuss
Oswald's role in the conspiracy?

GARRISON: Yes, but before you
can understand Oswald's role in the plot, you've got to jettison
the image of him as a "self-proclaimed Marxist" that
the mass media inculcated in the public consciousness after his
arrest on November 22nd. Oswald's professed Marxist sympathies
were just a cover for his real activities. I don't believe there
are any serious students of the assassination who don't recognize
that Oswald's actual political orientation was extreme right
wing. His associates in Dallas and New Orleans -- apart from
his CIA contacts -- were exclusively right wing, some covert,
others overt: in fact, our office has positively identified a
number of his associates as neo-Nazis. Oswald would have been
more at home with Mein Kampf than Das Kapital.

PLAYBOY: If Oswald wasn't a
leftist, what motivation would he have had for shooting at another
right-winger, Major General Edwin Walker, eight months before
the assassination

GARRISON: If he did it, his
motive -- which is to say the motive of those behind him -- was
a simple one: to ensure that after the assassination, people
would ask this very question and assume that because Oswald had
shot at General Walker, he must have been a left-winger. It was
just another part of Oswald's cover; if you defect to Russia,
pass out pro-Castro leaflets on street corners and take a pot
shot at General Walker, who on earth would doubt you're a Communist?
Of course, if you really look deeply into this incident, there
is no real proof that Oswald was the man who did it; the whole
charge rests on the unsupported testimony of Marina Oswald, after
she had been threatened with deportation if she didn't "cooperate."
It makes little difference, though, whether this incident was
prepared in advance to create a cover for Oswald or fabricated
after the assassination to strengthen his public image as a Marxist.
But we've gotten ahead of ourselves. Let's backtrack a bit to
fill in the background of Oswald's involvement in the conspiracy.
After "defecting" to Russia, where he served as an
agent for the CIA -- perhaps this is where his knowledge about
the U-2 becomes relevant -- he returned to this country in June
1962, lived in Fort Worth and Dallas until April 1963, and then
went to New Orleans, where he resumed his friendship with David
Ferrie, whom he had met several years before when he belonged
to a Civil Air Patrol unit led by Ferrie. We have evidence that
Oswald maintained his CIA contracts throughout this period and
that Ferrie was also employed by the CIA. In this regard, we
will present in court a witness -- formerly a CIA courier --
who met both Ferrie and Oswald officially in their CIA connection.
Parenthetically, Ferrie gave his name as Ferris to this witness
-- a name recorded without further explanation in Jack Ruby's
address book. In 1963, Ferrie and Oswald worked together closely.
They were two of the organizers of the group of anti-Castro exiles
and Minutemen who trained north of Lake Pontchartrain for a foray
into Cuba to assassinate Castro -- the venture that changed direction
in the summer of 1963 and chose John Kennedy as its new victim.
Toward this end -- for reasons that will become clear -- it became
Oswald's role to establish his public identity as a Marxist.
It appears that it was with this plan in mind that Oswald was
sent to Mexico City in order to get a visa for travel to Cuba,
where he planned to solidify his Marxist image, perhaps by making
himself conspicuous with a few incendiary anti-Kennedy speeches,
and then return to Dallas in time for the assassination. However,
this end of the plot was frustrated because the Soviet and Cuban
intelligence services apparently had Oswald pegged as an intelligence
agent, and he was refused visas at both embassies. Another way
in which Oswald tried to establish his procommunism was by setting
up a letterhead Fair Play for Cuba Committee -- of which he was
the only member -- and distributing on street corners leaflets
praising Castro. He made two blunders here, however. First, one
of the men helping him hand out leaflets was a fanatic anti-Castro
Cuban exile whom we've subsequently identified from TV footage
of a street incident. Second, Oswald "blew his cover"
by using the wrong address for his phony New Orleans Fair Play
for Cuba Committee.

PLAYBOY: Will you elaborate
on this second point?

GARRISON: Yes, because this
incident ties together some of the strands of the spider's web.
At the time Oswald started his so-called Fair Play for Cuba Committee,
two men -- Hugh Ward and Guy Banister -- operated a private investigative
agency at 544 Camp Street in downtown New Orleans. There are
some intriguing aspects to their operation. For one thing, Guy
Banister was one of the most militant right-wing anti-Communists
in New Orleans. He was a former FBI official and his headquarters
at 544 Camp Street was a clearinghouse for Cuban exile and paramilitary
right-wing activities. Specifically, he allowed his office to
be used as a mail drop for the anti-Castro Cuban Democratic Revolutionary
Front; police intelligence records at the time reported that
this group was "legitimate in nature and presumably had
the unofficial sanction of the Central Intelligence Agency."
It did. Banister also published a newsletter for his clients
that included virulent anti-Kennedy polemics. My office also
has evidence that Banister had intimate ties with the Office
of Naval Intelligence and the CIA. Both Banister and Ward were
deeply involved in covert anti-Castro exile activities in New
Orleans. Banister in particular seemed to have had an almost
messianic drive to fight communism in every country in Latin
America; and he was naturally of value to Cuban exiles because
of his intimate connections with American intelligence agencies.
In the Ramparts article you mentioned earlier, ex-FBI
agent Bill Turner revealed that both Banister and Ward were listed
in secret Minutemen files as members of the Minutemen and operatives
of a group called the Anti-Communism League of the Caribbean,
which was allegedly used by the CIA in the overthrow of the Guatemalan
government in 1954. So, in other words, these are the last guys
in the world you'd expect to find tied up with left-wing or pro-Castro
activities. Right? And yet, when Lee Harvey Oswald set up his
fictitious branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New
Orleans, he distributed leaflets giving the committee's address
as 544 Camp Street -- Guy Banister's office! Somebody must have
pointed out to Oswald shortly afterward that he was endangering
his cover by using this address, because he subsequently changed
it to 4907 Magazine Street. But it's certainly significant that
at the inception of his public role as a pro-Castro activist,
Oswald was utilizing the mailbox of the most militantly conservative
and anti-Communist outfit in the city. I might add that we have
several witnesses who will testify in court that they saw Oswald
hanging out at 544 Camp Street. I want to stress, however, that
I have no evidence that Banister and Ward were involved in the
plot to kill Kennedy. Their office was a kind of way station
for anti-Castro and right-wing extremists passing through New
Orleans, and it's perfectly possible that they were completely
unaware of the conspiracy being hatched by men like Ferrie and
Oswald.

PLAYBOY: Were any of the other
figures in the alleged conspiracy connected with Banister?

GARRISON: Yes, David Ferrie
was a paid investigator for Banister, and the two men knew each
other very well. During 1962 and 1963, Ferrie spent a good deal
of time at 544 Camp Street and he made a series of mysterious
long-distance phone calls to Central America from Banister's
office. We have a record of those calls.

PLAYBOY: Where are Banister
and Ward now?

GARRISON: Both have died since
the assassination -- Banister of a heart attack in 1964 and Ward
when the plane he was piloting for New Orleans Mayor De Lesseps
Morrison crashed in Mexico in 1964. De Lesseps Morrison, as it
happened, had introduced Clay Shaw to President Kennedy on an
airplane flight in 1963.

PLAYBOY: Do you believe there
was anything sinister about the crash that killed both Morrison
and Ward?

GARRISON: I have no reason to
believe there was anything sinister about the crash, though rumors
always spring up in a case like this. The only thing I will say
is that witnesses in this case do have a habit of dying at the
most inconvenient times. I understand a London insurance firm
has prepared an actuarial chart on the likelihood of 20 of the
people involved in this case dying within three years of the
assassination -- and found the odds 30 trillion to one. But I'm
sure NBC will shortly discover that one of my investigators bribed
the computer.